6 - The Continuing Cost of Empire

Summary

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower

“My Lord, you can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.”

Talleyrand

You might be forgiven for thinking that, with this degree of economic difficulty and social distress all around them, the full attention of the political class in both the United States and the United Kingdom would be focused on these two features of life alone. But, of course, the full attention of those who govern us is not so singularly focused, because in each case those in power in Washington, DC and in London do more than govern internally. They also move around the world stage as important and intrusive players. They each supervise economies, one major export of which are armaments sold to governments and individuals abroad;* and they each rely on societies, part of whose stability is underwritten by both the legacies and the contemporary practice of empire. There is an external dimension to the flaws of contemporary capitalism in both the UK and the US. We therefore need both to understand the linkage between external role and internal weakness in each case, and to see that – in consequence – going beyond the internal flaws of each economy and society will require, as one element of reform, a major resetting of those external roles.

The most immediate costs of empire are most visible in the empire which is most immediate: namely the American one. The British empire is now very much a thing of the past, and the British like to think of themselves as fully post-imperial. But to the degree that they do, they partially delude themselves: because the economy and the society of the contemporary UK continues to be shaped by the legacies of an empire now gone. Those longer and more subtle costs of empire await America down the line; which is why here it makes sense to focus on the immediate costs of empire through American data and the longer consequences of empire through British data.